Analysis on IT trends and competitive strategies, with emphasis on micro processors, computer systems and networks. Based on latest news, backed up with real data, this site intends to provide a true and realtime picture of the fast changing IT landscape. This journal strives to be accurate on facts and sharp on criticisms. You may email your opinion to sharikou@yahoo.com or post comments here, be cool and intelligent.

About Me

Freelance journalist on IT matters. Some of my writings have been published on online IT journals. Any original content on this journal is Copyrighted, but it's free for non-commercial use. Any Trademarks used on this site belong to their respective owners. Some of the pictures are links. If there is any issue with the content of this site, please email sharikou@yahoo.com .

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

INTEL's last hope: marketing

The Centrino team at Israel are hyping up their 32 bit Core Duo and 32 bit Merom technology like crazy. You feel a sense of desperation, even the usually soft speaking Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64 said "[o]nly a psychoanalyst would be fully qualified to analyse Intel's behaviour".

What's revolutionary about the 32 bit Core Duo? According to Mooly Eden, there were two technologies, Dynamic Intel Smart Cache Sizeing and Enhanced Intel(R) Deeper Sleep. Frankly, I don't see anything revolutionary here, these two can be best described as minor improvements, Core Duo is pretty much two Pentium M cores glued together and put on a shared front side bus. After so many years, the Israeli amateurs have not figured out how to do 64 bits and Mooly Eden's excuse was that "It may take many years for enterprises to demand it (64 bit)".

So, we fully analysed INTEL Israel's hypish marketing on all three aspects. Core Duo is no revolutionary chip, is just a modification of Pentium III; Core Duo is not 70% faster, but 10-20% slower than AMD's lowest entry level Athlon 64 X2 3800+; Core Duo does not run cooler, but runs hotter than Opteron 875HE server chip (2.2GHZ, dual core, 8 way SMP).

I am impressed by Israeli's ability to hype, but I am equally unimpressed by their ability to deliver.

Now, what about the "revolutionary" NGMA called Merom designed by the same Israeli team? Again, from the all hype no beef messages, I don't see anything revolutionary there for the so called NGMA. The only new feature we know is the so called 4-issue core. However, the PowerPC 970 has a 4-issue core, yet Steve Jobs was not impressed. Can INTEL Israel do better than IBM? I seriously doubt it.

When Mooly Eden went back to Israel to talk to some of his old collegues, they told him: 'You're only one year in marketing, and already you're brain-damaged."'

It is simple but inescapable logic: INTEL's unit share loss is inevitable due to its inferior technology, even Joe Osha sees that today. The only way for INTEL to maintain constant revenue is to reduce production and hike prices. This is a workable plan, because AMD can only supply about 30% of the market, INTEL can dictate the prices on the remaining 70%.

By reducing production and hiking prices, INTEL can keep inventory low and maintain constant revenue and even higher profit for 2006 and hope to come back in 2007 with vengeance.

Top INTC and DELL dumpers and AMD buyers

Logically, AMD buyers must be INTEL dumpers, and INTEL dumpers must be DELL dumpers. This is the winning strategy I employ and it would be interesting to see which big houses are playing the same game.

So let's go to www.nasdaq.com, and check the most recent institutional ownership reports.

As I pointed out here, since 52.6% of DELL's revenue and 68.3% of DELL's profit come from corporate market in Americas, and AMD is going to penetrate US corporate market in a big way, if DELL failed to go AMD before 2Q06, then it would be too late. Now it turned out that both HP and Lenovo have already booked AMD's capacity, DELL is out of the AMD64 game. Lenovo will definitely beat DELL on price and performance with ADM64 and its China based manufacturing.

Socket 754 Athlon 64 benchmark duel against Xeon EM64T

I have an Athlon 64 3000+ (socket 754, 2GHZ, 512KB L2 cache) box running 64 bit Linux, it has 1GB PC3200 RAM and two 7200RPM SATA drives. I bought the CPU+Motherboard combo at Frys for about $80 on sale, the board is an ECS K8M800-M2. Since all AMD64 processors share the same key characteristics (embedded memory controller, hypertransport, PowerNow, etc), I consider this Athlon 64 Socket 754 a poor man's Opteron, even though it only supports single channel DDRI.

So let me do some basic tests. First we run some commands to show system info:

The server is live and running quite some web sites, with little CPU load. Now, let's do some OpenSSL benchmarks on our little Socket 754 friend. OpenSSL is used for secure internet communications and its performance mostly depends on CPU speed.

As we can see from the result, the Athlon 64 3000+ can do 1478 verifies per second for 4096 bit RSA keys. I don't have access to an Xeon box now, fortunately, AnandTech has the OpenSSL benchmark results for Xeon 3.6GHZ EM64T here, allow me to copy part of it (for Xeon 3.6GHZ EM64T):

Now, let me do some Apache stress testing on our poor little Socket 754 friend. I will use the "ab" command to retrieve a SHTML web page, since it's shtml, the Apache server will have do some processing, so this is a tougher test than static HTML. I am running the ab program on the Athlon 64 box:

This is not bad at all. From this test, under 32 bit Windows, the dual core Xeon 2.8GHZ handles 1199 requests/second. Although GamePC's test did not provide information such as file size, our tests was on a 260KB page, which is bigger than average. Our tests were under 64 bit Linux, so there must an advantage there.

The conclusion is obvious: Socket 754 Athlon 64 3000+ is 40% to 100% faster than the fastest single core Xeon processor in web environment, and is probably faster than dual core Xeons too.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Real men have 64 bit laptops

Once a guy showed off his new notebook computer to me, it looked kinda cute but was an INTEL 32 bit Centrino. He asked me what kind of laptop I have, I said: "I have a 64 bit notebook".

I took out my notebook, powered it on, the GRUB boot screen appeared, the first option was CentOS 4 for AMD64, the second option was Windows XP X64, the third was Windows XP 32 bit. And I said: "Yours uses an INTEL CPU. INTEL has not mastered the AMD64 instructions yet".

I hit the enter key, the beautiful Linux boot sequence scrolled along, quickly, the 64 bit kernel booted up, powernow-k8 started, X Window started, I promptly logged in as root like a seasoned UNIX sysadmin, typed "openssl speed rsa", in a brief moment, the results were produced, and I told da guy: "check the score, this is much faster than your 3GHZ DELL PowerEdge 1850".

I forgot to run the Apache bench and say: "Real men have 64 bit laptops".

Clearly, INTEL's V//V is just another effort of bundling outdated INTEL 32 bit FSB based hardware for more profit, while AMD Live! is a set of industry leading technologies combined to enhance people's life style.

According to this study by United Chemi-Con, "temperature (ambient temperature and internal heating due to ripple current) is the most critical to the life of aluminum electrolytic capacitors".

Why?

"Because a capacitor is essentially an electrochemical device, increased temperatures accelerate the chemical reaction rates within the capacitor (usually a 10°C rise in temperature will double the chemical reaction rate). Therefore, higher temperatures cause accelerated changes in decreasing capacitance and increasing tan d due to the gradual evaporation of the electrolyte through the capacitor seal".

So, in essence, higher temperature leads to faster evaporation of electrolyte inside the capacitor, and leads to dead capacitors. How much faster?

According to this study, when you increase the temperature by 10C, the weight loss of the electrolyte increases 1.9 times. In other words, 10C of temperature increase cuts the capacitor life by half. Needless to say, when the capacitor is dead, the motherboard is dead, and the system is dead.

Other factors, such as operating voltage and ripple-current also affects capacitor life.

I had predicted that the impending mass extinction of Netburst based Pentium 4 and Xeon will slow customer purchase of INTEL technology in 2006. Few enterprises want to invest millions in CPUs that will be obsolete in just 6 months. Even those diehard INTEL fanboys will wait till 4Q06 for Conroe and Merom. Coupled with growing market recognition of AMD64, I expect 15-20% fall of INTEL's revenue in 1Q06.

Yet, even fewer enterprises will invest millions in CPUs that will be obsolete in just 3 months, therefore expect INTEL's revenue to fall even more in 2Q06, as we get nearer to the release of INTEL's next generation 32 bit technology that is incompatible with the AMD64 and HyperTransport industry standards.

Those who are uninformed and still pouring millions into the dying Netburst P4 and Xeon will regret deeply in just a few months, and will turn their backs to INTEL in the near future.

The whole INTEL architecture is in an unstable flux. We hear about all these INTEL vaporware which no one has seen yet touted as the next killer chip. Even if its engineering matches its marketing, INTEL means discontinuity. INTEL's outdated FSB technology often requires new chipsets and new buses when upgrading the CPU, this means you will have to get a new motherboard for a new INTEL CPU. You need a new motherboard when going from Paxville to Dempsey, then you need another new board when going from Dempsey to Woodcrest, when you choose Conroe for desktop, it's a whole new purchase yet again-- even the voltage regulator must be changed.

AMD64 provides a continuous upgradable path. You can upgrade from single core AMD to dual core then to quad-core. The beauty of HyperTransport even allows today's 3rd party chipset to work with future AMD CPUs -- AMD64 CPUs connects directly to memory and HyperTransport is the only communication between the CPU and the rest of the external world, and HyperTransport is backward compatible.

Software compatibility will be a major issue for INTEL. Microsoft Windows Vista is built for AMD64, you can see this when you use Microsoft's C++ compiler options. SUN Java officially only supports AMD64. Linux has work around code for INTEL's EM64T but there are major performance compromises. Solaris 10 doesn't support EM64T at all.

1) DELL getting bigger and bigger portion of the INTEL pie, right now, DELL accounts for about 25% of INTEL's units, eventually, DELL should account for 40% of INTEL's units, based on the assumption that INTEL's unit share drops to 60%, and ASP drops by 20%.

RBC Capital Markets did channel checks and concluded that INTEL's "March quarter, as well as 2006 business trends, are significantly lower than current expectations."

How much lower? My estimate is 15% to 20% lower.

Informed computer users who want to buy a PC now will choose AMD64, even INTEL diehards not in a hurry will wait till 4Q06 for Conroe. The 3rd world is INTEL's only refuge, but 60% of DELL's business is in US. (100- 60 = 40, matches DELL's weekX revenue numbers).

The value of this truth telling Journal

I hate to see poor individual investors screwed by the rich. Enron is a good example. WorldCom is another. Many less informed, less intelligent and gullible people got financially ruined by high-IQ crooks.

I knew it was impossible for DELL to beat, outdated INTEL 32 bit technology doesn't sell. No matter how much lipstick you apply to a pig, it's still a pig. So I took a look at DELL's report, and wrote "DELL: the real story". It analysed the core businesses of DELL, and showed that DELL's revenue was in sequential decline in the holiday season. I also pointed out that DELL and INTEL are in perfect sync, and DELL's weak January is a bad omen for INTEL's 1Q06.

Wall Street is no fool. DELL's stock plunged big time the next day, as people started to see the real picture.

DELL dudes are no idiots, so they would try very hard to downplay the weekX.

During the DELL conference call, its CFO Jim Schneiderstated that "we had an extra week in the quarter that contributed about 2 to 3 points of added growth, which was slightly more than we expected."

So according to DELL's CFO, weekX was only 30% to 40% of an average DELL week, and actually DELL was expecting less from weekX. Basically, DELL was saying that weekX should be and was pretty much a dead week. What's special about this week, which was one month after the Christmas week? What about weekX+1 and weekX -1?

The Wall Street analysts are not stupid, they sensed the problem there and pressed on for more details on revenue from the weekX, and Kevin Rollins, DELL CEO stated under oath:"I would say, because the consumer business trends off in the January timeframe, and it has its kind of lowest in ebb in Q2, the gains would have most likely been made in the corporate and enterprise arena worldwide at the end of that week. That’s why we were a little bit guarded on the extra week, because corporations don’t buy per day. They have a budget in a quarter that their IT folks are able to spend or not spend and meet. So we did not think we would get a full week’s impact out of that extra week due to that."

This is a very wordy answer for a simple question. Every company has a determinative method of recognizing revenue, DELL is no exception. According to DELL's SEC filings, essentially, revenue is recognized when the products are delivered to customers. Therefore, there is a specific revenue number for weekX and DELL knows what that number is -- just account the products leaving DELL's shipping docks, and DELL can pull that information at a mouse click as its system is fully computerised.

I bet that one day, SEC will have to open DELL's books and compute the revenue for weekX.

SUN Java does not support EM64T

Go to the Java download page at java.sun.com, there is only Java runtime for AMD64, no support for EM64T. I think INTEL's engineers should work 10 times harder so they can get an AMD64 compatible CPU out.

DELL: the real story

DELL just reported results for the period of 14 weeks from Oct 29, 2005 to Feb 3, 2006 with revenue of $15.2 billion and EPS of $0.43, beating average estimate of $0.41. Sounds good?

First, wait a minute, in last year, the reporting period was from Oct 30, 2004, to January 28, 2005, 13 weeks. There is one extra week for the current period, there should be a 1/13 adjustment for a fair comparision. The burning question is: did all those analysts add an extra week when estimating DELL's results? Let's adjust DELL's revenue, and let's compare DELL's results year over year, and quarterly sequential.

Now, look at DELL's balance sheet: it has $9.06 billion cash and short term investments, but $9.84 billion of bills to pay. DELL's stock holder equity dropped from $4.8 billion to $4.1 billion in just three months.

$4.1 billion net asset and $75 billion market cap, with revenue dropping year/year on two its main segments.

The last time INTEL brought in some new gene pool was Bob Colwell, who took some RISC ideas into the x86 and designed the Pentium Pro, which is the basis of all INTEL Cores today.

AMD may also have some defective genes, but it kept bringing in new blood: first new tech talent from NexGen, DEC, then management from Motorola (Hector) and more talents from IBM, SUN and INTEL. Opteron is Alpha EV7 for x86, and I am sure the IBM, SUN folks will bring fresh ideas. AMD is constantly evolving.

*) Sometimes the crooks may even try to create a perception that Rule 0 is changed, for instance, they may try to redefine valuation formula to other seemingly justfiable schemes, as we have witnessed in the dot.com era.

*) Goldman Sachs seemed to be a real loser, it sold 12.6 million AMD shares, but it also sold about 10% of its INTC holdings.

*) Morgan Stanley is true to its words, upgraded AMD and increased its AMD holdings by over 200%.

*) UBS crooks had sell rating on AMD, but silently increased its AMD shares by 123.70%. Seeming to be satisfied by the quantity of AMD shares it has now, it is upgrading AMD from sell to neurtal, saying INTEL's new CPUs in 2006 won't slow AMD's market share gain.

"In addition to the 50 percent decrease in CPU utilization, the 32-bit servers experienced noticeable spikes in which the CPUs were utilized at 100 percent for sustained periods of time. The operations team determined that a spike occurred when one or more application pools ran out of virtual memory and recycled. On the x64-based servers, these spikes do not exist because the application pools are no longer running out of memory."

In this paper, Microsoft tested some applications on Opteron on Windows x64 and was seeing up to 17.7 times performance gain (1770%).

"Microsoft.com has standardized on the HP Proliant DL585 models for the x64-based Web servers with four 2.2-GHz AMD CPUs and 16 GB of RAM. These enterprise-class servers have many redundant components, including power supplies, network adapters, and cooling fans, and have the capability for redundant array of independent disks (RAID) disk storage and RAM configurations."No surprise here, Opteron is the king of AMD64. We all know INTEL's EM64T runs slower in 64 bit mode than 32 bit mode. IA64 (Itanium) has also lost Microsoft's blessing.

Monday, February 13, 2006

Why DELL will go AMD sooner than later

because it has no choice!

0) Because of the competitive advantage of AMD64, DELL will enter the AMD market eventually. But DELL wants to choose the best timing to swicth to AMD --- when AMD64 has wide market recognition and capacity, DELL will just ride the wave. That's the perfect plan. But, INTEL is no idiot.

1) INTEL can't allow DELL to suck its blood any more--lower units and lower ASP leads to lower revenue, more DELL business means less money for INTEL.

2) So INTEL has to eliminate the extra kick backs to DELL.

3) If DELL decides to switch to AMD, then INTEL eliminates the kick backs, DELL will cry loud saying INTEL cut the candies because of AMD, and that's anti-trust violation.

4) So INTEL has to strike first, before DELL makes the move, INTEL must eliminate the rebates. This way DELL has no way to complain, this also weakens AMD's lawsuit a little bit.

5) DELL going AMD will only lead to marginal benefit for AMD at first, it will eat a lot of whitebox AMD business. However, once AMD has the capacity, DELL may go 100% AMD.

In Apache Benchmark, a 2.6GHZ FX60 dual core is twice as fast as a INTEL 2.8GHZ dual core Xeon Paxville. This implies that a 2.6GHZ AMD dual core is faster than INTEL's 2.8GHZ quad-core expected in 2007.

Note this has nothing to do with CPU performance. You could slow an INTEL chip down to 1MHZ and Skype would still try 10-way call, and we all know AMD CPUs are vastly faster than anything INTEL can offer. In this CNET test, the slowest AMD CPU is faster than the fastest INTEL CPU. INTEL is losing market share in all segments, and INTEL's stock crashed to half price of AMD's.

What we see in the INTEL-Skype case is different. This time INTEL is not meddling with its own software, but the most popular VoIP software from a third party. This is clearly intended to block AMD from the VoIP market, and give INTEL a monopoly power in that market. I am quite sure that such plots are part of the VIIV programme and Eric Kim is behind it.

INQ needs to write what it is good at

Most idiots have an overblown impression of DELL. DELL has no 30% market share, moron! DELL is only slightly higher than HP in unit share. DELL ships about 10 million PCes per quarter. According to IDC, DELL's global market share was 17.2% in 4Q05, HP's unit share was 15.7%, DELL is only 1.5% more than HP in units, HP is doing AMD all the way. You got to have some common sense.

Demerjian's analysis based on AMD's share in non-DELL market is flawed, the dynamics is much more complex than that--DELL entering AMD business will definitely cause AMD to slow its growth in HP and whitebox market. But even if we took his approach but with the right numbers, we have

1) AMD's share in non-DELL market = 21.4/(100-17.2) = 25.8%

2) Assume after DELL-AMD deal, AMD will take the same share off the DELL pie, AMD will get 25.8% * 17.2% = 4.43%

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Socket F Opteron to be released in 2Q06

This page lists the spec for Socket F (1207) Opteron obtained from AMD's presentation at the ISSCC conference, die size 220 mm^2, frequency 2.6GHZ, max power 95 watts. AMD said there is a 7% frequency margin, indicating initial speed can go up to 2.8GHZ. AMD also claimed that by dropping voltage from 1.35v to 1.1v, there is a 58% reduction of leakage current, however, frequency drop is only 15%, this means AMD can make a very low power version of the new Opteron. You can see an image of the Opteron core here. Pay attention of the size of the cache. Now consider that INTEL has to keep doubling their cache sizes.

Back in 2003, four INTEL teams had studied doing 64 bit on Pentium and concluded that was not possible. After the release of AMD 's 64 bit Opteron, reverse engineering the AMD's 64 bit instructions has been proven a tough job for INTEL engineers. INTEL's first attempt was to emulate AMD64 on Pentium 4, as Pentium 4 has 36 bit physical address and is easy to pretend to be more than 32 bit. AMD Opteron has 40 bit physical address and allows 1TB of memory, the CPUID instruction on the Opteron is set to report 40 to the OS, so the OS knows the capabilities of the CPU. Although Pentium 4 and Xeons have only 36 bit address, INTEL engineers blindly copied AMD's instructions, thus INTEL's clone also reported 40 bits, instead of 36. This caused 64 bit version of Windows and Linux to crash miserably on INTEL. As of today, INTEL's so called EM64T on Pentium 4 is still missing crucial features in AMD64 and performs slower in 64 bit mode than 32 bit mode.

Since INTEL is set to terminate all Pentium 4 based CPUs and will base everything on the Merom architecture. It has to start the cloning of AMD64 afresh. Since Merom is based on Pentium Pro core , and is physically 32 bit (unlike Pentium 4's 36 bit), emulating 64 bit on P3 is proven to be even harder than doing it on Pentium 4.

INTEL has to comfort customers and analysts by claiming that two 32 bit INTEL cores together is better than one 64 bit core, as if two 286s (16 bit) are better than one 486(32 bit). Although INTEL has promised 64 bit support for the Merom architecture set to release in 4Q06, its continuing deemphasis on 64 bit on the eve of Windows Vista raises concerns that INTEL's implmentation may have compatibility issues with the x86_64(or AMD64) standard.

In any case, running a 2P server with Sossaman32 CPUs inevitably creates a substantial imbalance between CPU power and memory capacity: 4 high speed 2GHZ Cores fighting for a maximum of 4GB memory is not a pretty sight in any server configuration. The situation is especially dire for Sossaman32 users who run memory demanding processes such as J2EE, JSP, .NET, ASP, PHP, LAMP web applications, database servers, concurrent transactional apps and other data intensive applications. The shared 667MHZ front side bus provides a meager 166MHZ average bandwidth to each Sossaman32 core for memory and I/O, which is another major bottleneck.

AMD exited 32 bit mainstream market long ago. Its 32 bit product line is only for embedded market. The AMD GeodeNX is actually a 32 bit K7.

AMD demoed quad-core Opteron in 2005

One old INTEL marketing strategy is to promise pie in the sky vaporware to keep customers interested, then keep pushing the delivery time back again and again and again. INTEL did this on Itanium, we heard all these marvelous stories about dual core 2GHZ Itanium 2 years ago, and the story repeated with delivery time changed over and over, now INTEL is pumping 1.6GHZ version. INTEL did this on the 4GHZ Pentium 4, until it was finally cancelled. INTEL did this on Merom, first it's 2H06, people was expecting it in mid 2006, then 3Q06, then 4Q06, I would not be surprised if INTEL pushes this again to 1Q07---INTEL's engineers simply don't have enough skill to copy AMD64 instruction set properly, as we have seen in the past. INTEL said two 32 bit Core Duo is better than 64 bit, which was like saying two 16 bit 286 was better than one 32 bit 486 -- a convenient excuse for their failure to copy AMD64.

AMD demoed quad-core Opteron to its customers back in October 2005. Major server vendors such as HP, Sun, IBM and Rackable had seen the quad, and motherboard makers such as Tyan and SuperMicro had seen it too.

Furthermore, the quad-core Opteron will run on existing Socket 940 platform for single core and dual core Opterons, offering a painless upgrading path for Opteron users today.

INTEL's so-called multi-core is actually a primitive multi-die kludge, which is basically multiple CPU dies tied to the same shared bus.

Friday, February 10, 2006

Why should AMD move to China 100%?

US government only likes INTEL, its procurement specifies INTEL brand, in other words, US government explicitly excludes AMD(and others). US FTC ignores AMD's complaints, DOJ silently endorses INTEL's monopolistic actions by doing nothing to stop it. AMD is fighting for its survival. This is the situation 3 years after the introduction of Opteron and AMD64.

China has an annual trade surplus of $200 billion with the US. China has a foreign reserve of $800 billion. Chinese may not be rich, but their government is well managed financially and has mega tons of money and they spend lavishly on hi-tech gear.

If AMD moves 100% to China, its revenue will jump $1 billion instantly. Chinese government will immediately specify AMD brand for all government purchases, INTEL will be excluded in China

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Raid or visit?

Let me take out the dictionary,Websters' College Dictionary 4th Edition.

Raid: any sudden invasion of a place for discovering and dealing with violations of law.Visit: to go or come to see

INTEL folks, what Korean FTC did fits the first definition perfectly. Officials stormed in, probably armed, and ordered you to turn in boxes of confidential documents for investigation of illegal dealings. That's a raid by definition of the English dictionary. There was no force used, but I bet the Korean officials were prepared to use force if your folks refused to cooperate.

SUN drives me crazy

Another JXXX. It was SeeBeyond, now it's JCAPS, yes, very creative, it's the catch all, J followed by all CAPS. If Scott can't remember all the JXXX trademarks, JCAPS summarizes them all. I think SUN can turn profit by just cutting the attorney fees for registering these JCAPS.

I challenged SUN to create a Solaris 10 control panel similar to Windows server 2003 control panel long long time ago. I still don't see it coming. Guess it is super hard. Now I know why Bill Gates is smart and Microsoft is making money. You get paid by selling products, you don't get paid by giving away technology. Microsoft is selling products, even though they are crappy; SUN is giving away technologies, even though they are marvelous. Windows Server 2003 with a GUI control panel is a complete and usable product; Solaris 10 without a control panel is a piece of cryptic technology that few can take advantage of.

In contrast, the US government is paying $563 million more of tax payers' money by illegally specifying INTEL brand in its computer purchases. This is state sponsored iNTEL monopoly, pure and simple.

If you compare the DOJ's Microsoft case and the AMD's INTEL case, what INTEL has done is 10 times more severe. Why aren't FTC and DOJ doing anything, despite the continuing behaviour such as excluding AMD CPUs from Skype 10-way conference call?

INTEL is using its monopoly power to keep us in the dark age of 32 bit computing.

I think AMD better move to Europe or China and break free from the illegal monopolistic control of the CPU market.

Skype 2.0 software will allow 10-way conference calls only if it detects code specific to Intel's chips when the PC boots, said Rob Crooke, vice president of Intel's Business Client Group. Intel approached Skype with its plan to optimize code on its chips for Skype's software so users would have a good experience while hosting a multiperson conference call, Crooke said.

AMD may release quad-core Opteron HE soon

According to this MSI roadmap , thin & light dual core Turion 64 notebook will be available in 2Q06 with 25 watt TDP. This indicates that AMD should be able to release HE version of quad-core Opteron at 55 watts soon.

MSI is also releasing Socket F Opteron boards supporting DDRII up to 533/667/800MHZ. The MSI K9SD Master to be relased in June 2006 features 16 DDRII slots. In comparison, the INTEL Bensley/Dempsey/Blackford only support DDRII 533/667 FBDIMM.

Monday, February 06, 2006

INTEL: 2 x 32 > 64

INTEL had a technology conference call on the 32 bit Core Duo processor with revolutionary INTEL(R) Deeper Sleep Technology(DST). Admittedly, I almost fell into deep sleep while listening to the CC, but bursted into wild laughter when I heard Mooly Eden, Intel VP of the mobility group, said something I considered very funny.

What Eden said was basically that "Two 32 bit cores are better than one 64 bit core", apparently refering to Turion 64.

No, no, no, Mooly, 2x32bit is only 33 bit! You know that, right?

Then our smart Ben Lynch surprised us techies with a deep question on "relative deficiencies in INTEL interconnects and scalability for multi-processor systems or multi-core CPUs", and how INTEL is going to address that with the next generation Merom architecture. While Molly was fumbling for an answer or excuse, another INTEL guy cut in and said this kind of server question should be defered to next IDF. But Ben Lynch pressed on, saying interconnect efficiency is also pertinent to dual core mobile. Cornered, the INTEL folks danced around, talking about balance of battery life and performance.

One analyst asked why users would need dual core mobile. Mr. Eden spent a long time and came up with all sorts of multi-tasking mobile computing scenarios, such as playing doom3 and ripping mp3 at the same time, zapping a virus while editing a spreadsheet, etc, etc.

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Beware of INTEL's tricks

I was reading the book "Inside Intel" by Tim Jackson. It's an eye opener to see how INTEL got rich. For example, in the early days of 8086, to eliminate Motorola, which had the 68000 CPU, INTEL initiated a marketing compaign called "Operation Crush". The goal was, quoting the leading INTEL exec, "We have to kill Motorola, that's the name of the game. We have to crush the f**king1 bastards. We're gonna roll over Motorola and make sure they don't come back again." One key INTEL tactic was the release of cataglogs of next generation CPUs 5x the speed to convince customers to choose INTEL. Such parts did not even exist on the drawing board. Motorola was fooled, instead of dimissing INTEL's vaporware, it released an honest catalog of next generation CPUs which were far less impressive.

Most disturbing was how INTEL deceived the Court and jury during an INTEL lawsuit against AMD on the issue of 286 microcode. It was about the interpretation of the term "microcomputer" in an INTEL-AMD licensing agreement. INTEL altered the date of some crucial internal document and removed some incriminating text from it. The jury was deceived, and issued a verdict against AMD.

It was by some pure luck that AMD found the original INTEL document and the judge ordered a new trial four months after the jury verdict. With the untampered evidence, AMD won. But AMD lost precious many months marketing its own 486 processors due to an injunction issued previously as a result of INTEL's lawsuit.

The lessons AMD should learn:

*) INTEL is again promising pie in the sky 45nm and next generation chips no one has seen. AMD should devise a good strategy against this and seize the moment. Platform stability is a key AMD advantage.

*) Beware of potential tampering of evidence in the anti-trust lawsuit. AMD needs to beef up its computer forensic expertise in its legal team. I think Google folks should be very good at mining the massive amount of documents and emails.

Note: The book had the four letter word + ing, I removed it, so children don't learn from the bad example.

Friday, February 03, 2006

Fan boys ask world to wait for INTEL

Hans Mosesmann at Moors & Cabot are asking people to wait for INTEL's Woodcrest CPU, which is expected to be out in 3Q06. He claimed that Bensley (Dempsey CPU + Blackford chipset) is being shipped for testing in 1Q06 (now) and will be out in volume in 2Q06, but then the socket compatible Woodcrest CPU can replace the Dempsey CPU in 3Q06.

Does Hans Mosesmann think people are stupid? First, in Q1, they buy INTC Paxville, which is too dumb, too slow and too hot; then in Q2 they buy INTC Dempsey the Athlon MP imitator, which is slower than old Opteron 246 in some tests, and then 3 months later, they find Dempsey too hot and "pull in" INTC Woodcrest, which is supposed to be cooler than Dempsey. If people were indeed stupid as Moors & Cabot liked to be, then INTC would make the same money three times in a row, leading to some $1.7 EPS.

The good news for the shrewd server buyer (such as Marc Andreessen) is, AMD will release quad-core Opteron in mid-2006. The fact these quads can plug into existing Socket 940 boards means their power consumption is no more than 95 watts. There are no surprises here. The Turion MT-40 is a 2.2GHZ CPU with max power of 25 watts, 4 of these make 100 watts. AMD should have no problem making a quad-core 2.2GHZ Opteron at 95 watts.

The choices for Opteron buyers are clear. They can buy single or dual core Opterons now with power of 30 watts (Opteron EE), 50 watts (Opteron HE) or 95 watts. Then they can upgrade to quad-core Opterons later with a simple BIOS flash.

Hans Mosesmann's FUD on Socket F Opteron and HyperTransport is pitifully laughable. Let me assure you this, the Socket F Opterons will be so advanced and strike so hard, INTEL will be beaten into guacamole.

BTW: Look at this score card, zero stars on seven of of the eleven companies covered. A monkey could have done a better job by throwing darts.

Analyst Hans Mosesmann, with analytical accuracy seemingly less than that of a dart throwing monkey, wrote with a sense of desperation,

On 2006 outlook: "AMD Valuation. Our 12-month price target of $10 for AMD shares is based on a 20x multiple to our 2006 EPS estimate of $0.50. The 20x multiple is an 11% premium to the company's historical 18x P/E ratio and is actually the same multiple we are applying to INTC shares, which is justified by our view given that AMD is a significantly better managed company today, under CEO and Chairman Hector Ruiz."

On AMD lawsuit: "[T]he timing of the complaint and the company's tone of indignation (perhaps exasperation) give us a sense that AMD's traction in processors that they enjoyed last year is not meeting expectations"

"It strikes us that AMD's approach is based on throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Intel in the hopes of getting something to stick."

Come on, SUN, can you beat Rackable?

Rackable reported yesterday that its 4Q06 revenue was $83.1 million, with over 90% of that revenue came from its Opteron server business, less than 10% from INTEL server business. During the conference call, Rackable commented that SUN does not pose a competitive threat, because SUN's Galaxy (also Opteron) product line is incomplete, but they expect SUN to release more Galaxy models.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Gateway should go 100% AMD

Gateway reported 4Q05 results with $0.06 profit per diluted share. The company sold 1.359 million PCes, of which 1.134 million were sold in the retail market. Gateway stock price is at less than $3.

My suggestion to Gateway: go with the leader, go 100% AMD.

AMD will give some nice discounts for sure, and Gateway can save the cost of dealing with the outdated INTEL technology, such as the costly BTX platform for extracting the 150 watts of heat from Pentiums.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

SGI CEO fired for buying INTEL

Silicon Graphics (SGI) used to be a big name in IT, it was the leader in computer graphics, movies such as Jurassic Park was made with SGI technology. I used to write 3D animations on IRIX workstations using GL. At some point later, SGI made the total switch to INTEL's Itanium. Betting the farm on something INTEL pumped billions into couldn't go wrong, right?

Nope. With Itanium struggling and falling far behind Opteron, SGI's business went down in a quick spiral. It was delisted from NYSE and traded on pink sheets.

With product revenue dropping 50% year over year, SGI finally fired its CEO for 6 years of failure. The blame was on INTEL not delivering a better Itanium chip, but who made the decision to buy INTEL took the hit.

AMD64 is five generations ahead of INTEL

It's impossible for me to cover this topic in great detail, so I will hit the key points only.

AMD64 Instruction set

In Feburary 2003, on the eve of AMD's launch of the AMD64 family CPUs, INTEL expressed its disblief. According to Richard Wirt, an INTEL senior fellow, four separate design teams at Intel had examined how the company could take one of its 32-bit chips and transform it into a 64-bit machine, all four Intel teams concluded that such a feat was not doable.

INTEL did try hard to do 64 bit on x86, but their engineering didn't know how.

But the grand masters at AMD did what INTEL thought was impossible. Opteron 64 hit the market in April 2003 and quickly won almost all performance benchmarks.

But running AMD64 instructions on Pentium III proves to be much harder, as of today, INTEL hasn't yet figured out how to do 64 bit on Pentium M and Core Duo.

And AMD is not sitting idle, it's adding a new set of instructions to the AMD64. INTEL engineers will have more sleepless nights digesting AMD PDFs.

True Multi-core

AMD64 architecture was designed to be true multi-core from the ground up. A multi-core CPU is much like a multi processor system, the cores must communicate with each other to maintain consistency. Inside the AMD64 CPU, there is a crossbar switch that connects the multiple cores together, so they communicate internally and at extremely high speed. We see from benchmarks that dual core Opteron is almost twice as fast as a single core Opteron at the same clock speed.

Chip design gurus have long realized that a major bottleneck in system performance is memory latency. Just like memory is much faster than hard disk, the CPU is much faster than memory. When a CPU needs to access memory for instructions or data, it has to wait for the memory content to be retrieved, the time of waiting is the latency. During the waiting period, the CPU can't do anything.

In the old FSB based architecture (all INTEL's), the memory controller is in an external chip called the north bridge, while the CPUs run at 2-3GHZ, the conventional memory controller runs at about 200MHZ. Furthermore, in the old FSB design, the data have to make two hops, from memory to memory controller, then to the CPU. As we can see from this article, memory latency in a Pentium 4 design is between 300 to 400 clock cycles.

In AMD64 design, the memory controller is embedded in the CPU and runs at CPU frequency, the CPU connects directly to the memory without any intermediate. As we can see from this IBM test on single and dual core Opteron, memory latency on the Opteron is only about 50 nano second for local memory access.

From INTEL roadmap as far as 2009, we don't see an embedded memory controller design.

Cache Coherent HyperTransport (ccHT)

In a N processor AMD system, since each CPU has its own memory controller and associated banks of memory, there are N memory controllers which provide N times the memory bandwith. To have these N memory controllers act coherently, there are multiple ccHT links between AMD CPUs, which is used for fetching memory from another CPU. As we can see from the IBM document referenced above, in the case of remote memory access, the latency is also quite small.

INTEL is rumored to work on something similar to ccHT called CSI, however, since the cancelation of the Whitefield project, CSI is missing from INTEL's foreseeable roadmap.

Direct Connect ArchitectureIn FSB based architecture such as INTEL's, the CPU, Memory and I/O share the bandwith of a uni-directional bus, just like many folks share one phone line in a conference call --- only one guy can talk in either direction. In AMD64 architecture (Opteron, Athlon 64, Turion 64, Sempron), there are separate dedicated connections between CPU and Memory, between CPU and I/O, between CPU and CPU, between CPU core and CPU core. In AMD64, there is no crosstalk, and everything is bi-directional--traffic goes both ways the same time.

From INTEL's roadmap, it's stuck with FSB architecture until at least 2009.

Conclusion

INTEL is 5 generations behind AMD, and there are other major areas that INTEL is lacking, such as IOMMU for fast DMA. To match AMD in 2 core performance, INTEL will have to use very large cache size, which will negate its shrink to 65nm. At 4 core and up level, INTEL is simply hopless.